The Pictures

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ABSTRACT: Talk story about how movie director James Cameron got his underwater footage of the wrecked Titanic for his new movie “Titanic.” When James Cameron was 11, he built a little submarine and sent it to the bottom of the Niagara River manned by a mouse. Now, 30 years later, Cameron gets to be the mouse. But this time he has gone 2.5 miles under the sea, to shoot footage of the wrecked Titanic, which provides the haunting emotional center of his epic film about the ship. To accompany him on the deep dive, into freezing waters northeast of Nova Scotia, Cameron called on Al Giddings, an underwater cinematographer who is accustomed to working with big fish on natural-history programs. To make the deep dive, the filmmakers used the world's only pair of submersibles able to withstand the pressure so far below the ocean's surface. These MIR subs, which came on loan, with their co-pilots, from the Russian Academy of Science, were originally used, during the Cold War, to monitor intercontinental communications links. Because the glass in the subs' portholes was too thick to film through with a wide-angle lens, Cameron recruited his brother Mike, an aerospace engineer (and a collaborator on the submersible-mouse project), to build complex remote-control cameras that wouldn't be crushed by the mammoth pressure. The camera was by itself in the cold and the dark for 16 hours a day, operated by Giddings and the director, each wedged inside one of the tiny submarines. “The glass in the cameras had to withstand over a million pounds of force,” Mike Cameron said. “Think of 14 fully loaded cement trucks stacked end to end, sitting on this piece of glass.” James Cameron and Giddings spent more than 200 hours on the great ship's decks. “We would float down, then drop for 3 hours, free fall, just to reach the bottom,” Giddings said. Obviously, at 12,640 feet down, there would be no reshoots. “About as many people have walked on the moon as have gone to the Titanic on a submersible,” Mike Cameron says. “There's no light there–it's blacker than space.” He said that he'd rather have sent his brother to Mars than to the Titanic. “The breathing apparatus they had is almost identical to what is used in space. There's a fire risk. There's a contamination risk. If a piece of wiring burns, the toxic gases from the wiring can get you.” The trickiest part of the deep dive was filming the rooms inside the wreck, so that they could be reconstructed inside a tank in Mexico. “We would park on the open upper deck of the ship, then launch the remotely operated vehicle–a sort of flying video camera,” Giddings said. “We'd watch on a monitor. Eventually, the ROV would hover down the grand staircase, then into the first-class cabins.” The corpses are long gone from the Titanic's ruined staterooms, but, Mike Cameron explained, because of the tannic acid in seawater, leather is perfectly preserved. “You'll find a pair of shoes neatly laid out there, marking the place where a body was.” With “Titanic” behind him, Al Giddings is back on the shark-and-whale circuit. “Nothing I've done is as provocative as working with humpbacks. You know you're being pondered by some wonderful brain,” he says. “Hollywood is totally different. It's like going to war.”